The present invention relates to telephony, and in particular to an audio conferencing platform.
Audio conferencing platforms are well known. For example, see U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,483,588 and 5,495,522. Audio conferencing platforms allow conference participants to easily schedule and conduct audio conferences with a large number of users. In addition, audio conference platforms are generally capable of simultaneously supporting many conferences.
A problem with audio conference platforms has been their distributed task system architectures. For example, the system disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,495,522 employs a distributed conference summing architecture, wherein each digital signal processor (DSP) generates a separate output signal (i.e., separate summed conference audio) for each of the phone channels that the DSP supports. That is, this prior art system generates a separate summed conference audio output signal for each of the phone channels. This is an inefficient system architecture since the same task is being simultaneously executed by a number of DSP resources.
Therefore, there is a need for a system that centralizes the audio conference summing task and provides a scalable system architecture.